Meanwhile…

David Haynes believed that the rise of online meetings was a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, meetings that should have just been emails could be given all the attention they deserved (none) and on days when the work was especially harsh, he could just keep going on his other monitor while passively listening in.

On the other hand, as he was furiously slapping shit away from the fan on one monitor, while listening to it messily splatter against it on the other, heedless of his efforts.

“Obviously,” Community Management Director Kevin Lande continued, “we don’t know anything. I tried to reach out to the devs about if this is a surprise event or something, but…” The tiny image of the perpetually-aggravated team lead gave a shrug heavy with frustration. He finished in a singsong voice: “they don’t talk to us because someone two years ago leaked something.”

The event Kevin was still mad about was long in the past, but had informed interdepartmental relations ever since. One time, someone explained the spawn rules for a Reputable Monster, to assure an aggravated player that it was behaving as intended. And now customer-facing teams couldn’t get a straight answer from anybody.

The player hadn’t even given David’s answer a thumbs-up for revealing valuable secrets. Bastard.

“So has anyone seen anything in-world to help us out?” Kevin pleaded. “Someone has to have seen something. Populations of entire towns are gone. That’s not normal.”

There was a bunch of noncommittal muttering.

David did his part to add to the wall of negativity. He wasn’t a great liar, but it was a lot easier when everyone else was saying the same thing - and telling the truth. Someone said something about MPKer activity, and Kevin didn’t like that answer. So much so, that he had to go around the table to ask for everyone to go over the specifics of the relevant tickets everyone had received.

As much as David was invested in how his smokescreen was going, he was busy throwing it up. His mouse clicked in a frenzy, snapping up GM tickets, shuffling them from the shared queue to his own workload. If he wanted to keep things progressing, he couldn’t let anyone else catch any issues that involved the Awakened directly.

Especially those flags still being thrown up by the players Hirrus was busily obliterating.

They were so close to their goal. Once Rumi was finished, the real work would begin, but that would only happen if Hirrus went uninterrupted. Another GM put onto his trail could undo all their prep work. Obviously, they’d try to Hammer him first. And then when that failed for them, too, they’d try and figure out what he was. And once they found that he wasn’t the only one…

Poof! No more Hirrus.

No more weapon.

“David?” Kevin prompted. “Do you have anything? And let’s keep things limited to the Northwest Hari situation, and not get bogged down with other bull-”

“Yeah. Yeah, actually,” David said. He turned to face his body towards his camera, hoping that the poor lighting in his cubicle meant that Kevin wouldn’t be able to tell his eyes were still on his other monitor, flicking tickets into his own inbox. “I’ve seen some tickets about captured RMs loose in the area, so I think Scarlet might be on the right track suggesting MPKers. We’ve never seen them this prolific and destructive, though, so they might be setting up for something. Is there some shitty holiday somewhere coming up? The anniversary of some historical massacre or something?”

As expected, that shut up the whole room immediately. Half of them were horrified at the idea that real human people might be using Conquest of Souls as a venue to celebrate real-world atrocities. The other half had been working as GMs long enough to not be surprised, and were busily Googling this week in history.

Meanwhile, a single player was angrily flagging Hirrus over and over again using every GM flag in the menu one after the other. David quietly shuffled into his queue the all-caps cuss-fest accusing “Hirrus Callabryn, Town Guard [NPC]” of “TOS Violation: RMT Activity, Thirty-Party Service Spam, or Account Phishing” and tried not to laugh at the absurdity of it.

At length, Kevin brought the meeting back to order and continued down the line. David only half-listened to the discussion, but was pleased to hear that his cover-up was working. He’d left a few breadcrumb tickets in the queue - hearing absolutely nothing would have been suspicious - but what he’d left the other GMs to find had been missing quest NPCs and destroyed towns.

He desperately needed them off the trail of the Awakened NPCs. It was bad enough that Hirrus had become a community meme. If the GM team learned what he actually was, it would all be over.

They’d come too far to let that happen.

The subject of the meeting inevitably moved over to the topic Mark wouldn’t shut up about.

There was a ticket every six hours of someone from Last of the Strong requesting a revert to restore what was lost at the hands of The Merciless One.

The department’s policy was to ignore sore losers, but because of the frequency and intensity of the demands - and the mystery still surrounding the situation - fucking Mark just wouldn’t toe the party line. Kevin was having none of it, but the format of these meetings meant Mark had to have his time on the floor.

David didn’t care what happened to Last of the Strong. But he wanted to keep one ear to the ground whenever The Merciless One was mentioned. If Last of the Strong got their hands on actual information about Hirrus, then letting their complaints slip through the cracks might be a problem.

Luckily, it seemed it was just the same request from a new mouth. Their leadership must have circulated a form letter for their members to spam the GMs with. Instead of discussing an investigation, Kevin was turning the discussion to disciplinary action in response to misuse of the report system.

Before the meeting ended, Kevin asked for volunteers to lead an in-game investigation of the Northwest Hari Situation. David was the first to put his name on the list. If he was on the team, it would make it that much easier to manage his cover-up.

“So I guess we should go from this meeting into that initial meeting,” Kevin said, “unless anybody has a conflict.”

“Uh, no conflict,” David said, “but I’ve got kind of a full ticket queue. Can we get that underway closer to end of day?”

Kevin frowned, and a sound of clicking came through his mic. His eyebrows shot up as soon as he saw the ticket count in David’s queue. “You’re not kidding. Okay, folks, put on your GM hats and focus down the tickets for today. I’ll put something on the calendar for tomorrow.”

David tried not to visibly gloat at the small victory. He only had to hide his smile for a few seconds as Kevin brought the meeting to a close.

The delay before the investigation began would give him time to figure out how the hell he was going to control the discussion. And even more than that, it gave him another full day of time. He only had to sweep this under the rug until the reset. After that, it didn’t matter what his coworkers did; the system itself would see to Hirrus’s safety.

As soon as he was disconnected from the meeting, he was able to look down at his phone.

Obviously, he couldn’t have a moment to think.

There was a text essay from his sister waiting, demanding his attention. Or, it was ostensibly from his sister. The essay was a thorough treatise on ethics around AI sentience, complete with a bibliography of cited sources provided in MLA format. It made him suspect that she’d just handed the phone to his niece, who was the member of the family most passionate about the AI Rights Movement. All he’d wanted to know was what would happen if a true AI was reset to an earlier state, and if it would cause them discomfort. What he’d gotten was an explanation that implied that Conquest of Souls was literally committing genocide every Tuesday for server mainteinence.

It made him regret asking about it. He quickly thumbed out a thank you message, saying that it would be great information for his blog post.

Neither his sister nor his niece would buy it. His niece was too full of desperate hope that she could convince him that AI were people, and his sister could read him like a book.

But he didn’t need them to believe. He just needed to keep them busy.

For now, though, he had to log in and start chipping away at his ticket queue. Again, just stalling people out. Spam them with questions about the situation. Dismiss as many tickets as he could. Issue suspensions for misuse of the reporting system. His all-consuming goal was keeping the rest of his team in the dark. As long as his in-game friends were allowed to act, everything would be fine. Hirrus would crush Rumi, stopping the Northwest Hari Situation from getting too big.

And then Nidra would turn him towards Hari’s Shadow Council, freeing the kingdom from the player’s control. Unmaking the greatest unanswered injustice in the game. Finally smiting the unsmitable.

After entering his login information, he slipped on his Companion Gloves to get to work. Conquest of Souls was VR-compatible, and all the ads showed full-dive users, but the vast majority just used Companion Gloves and monitors. Not even headsets. There was even a nontrivial community of mouse-and-keyboard purists. The QA team had the equipment to have their whole crew in full-dive immersion for testing, but every other department had a limited budget. Dive Pods were expensive, and not even the most eccentric billionaire on the board wanted to buy a pod for every employee with C-Gloves would do.

He told himself that he just had to do his part. Just had to make the tickets that would get Hirrus deleted go away.

All the other pieces were on the board and in motion.

Hirrus would do the rest as long as the hand of god didn’t come down and squish him.

He would rip and tear until it was done.

And if GM Dave did his part, Hirrus would get to live at the end of it. He would wake up in his beautiful house, with his beautiful wife. Same as it ever was.